Siraj al-Din Ibn al-Wardi and the the Kharidat al-'Aja'ib: Authority and Plagiarism in a Fifteenth Century Arabic Geographical Work

The present article examines the Ḫarīdat al-ʻajā’ib wa-farīdat al-ġarā’ib (The Pearl of Wonders and the Uniqueness of Strange Things), a fifteenth-century Arabic cosmography attributed to Sirāj al-Dīn Ibn al-Wardī (d. after 822/1419). The first part of the Ḫarīdat al-ʻajā’ib covers exclusively geographical topics. However, a longer redaction, which actually contains two further sections on early Arab history and eschatology, was prepared. As many other works of its genre, the Ḫarīdat al-ʻajā’ib is thus preserved in multiple versions and redactions as well as in various languages. The leading objective of this study is to investigate a series of philological problems that are generated by the fluid and dynamic textual transmission of this work. Therefore it will touch issues concerning the structure and the arrangement of the contents within the Ḫarīdat al-ʻajā’ib and in relation to other Arabic cosmographies, the formation of multiple versions over the time, the presence of “erratic” parts inside the work, the use of sources and the nineteenth-century method of editing the work. The article also addresses a few problems concerning Sirāj al-Dīn Ibn al-Wardī as “author” of the Ḫarīdat al-ʻajā’ib as well as some more general issues relating to “distributed” authorship and plagiarism in Arabic literature.